The Missing Madonna

The story behind the Met’s most expensive acquisition.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent purchase of an early Renaissance “Madonna and Child” by Duccio di Buoninsegna, for a price said to have been between forty-five and fifty million dollars, has been greeted by most New Yorkers with unruffled calm. Although the acquisition was covered extensively last November, with emphasis on the price and the extreme rarity of works by this Sienese master, the little picture (it measures eleven inches high by just over eight inches wide, and is painted in tempera and gold on a wooden panel) has not attracted the multitudes that would make it difficult to see. In 1963, when the “Mona Lisa” came to the Met for a month, more than a million people stood in long lines; but on a number of occasions this spring, when I went to look at the Duccio, I was the only person in the room. To be sure, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian paintings lack the popular clout of works by Leonardo or van Gogh, but you’d think more people would be curious about something that cost more than double what the Met had spent on any previous acquisition.

Small as it is, the painting has a powerful presence. It captures the eye from a distance, and commands, up close, something like complete attention. Holding the Christ child in her left arm, the Virgin looks beyond him with melancholy tenderness, while the child reaches out a tiny hand to brush aside her veil. Centuries of Byzantine rigidity and impersonal, hieratic forms are also brushed aside in this intimate gesture. We are at the beginning of what we think of as Western art; elements of the Byzantine style still linger—in the gold background, the Virgin’s boneless and elongated fingers, and the child’s unchildlike features—but the colors of their clothing are so miraculously preserved, and the sense of human interaction is so convincing, that the two figures seem to exist in a real space, and in real time. Candle burn marks on the frame, which is original, testify to the picture’s use as a private devotional image. It is dated circa 1300.

Although the “Madonna and Child” was well known in art-historical circles as the only one of Duccio’s dozen or so surviving paintings to remain in private hands, its whereabouts had been uncertain since the death, in 1949, of its last registered owner, the Belgian collector Adolphe Stoclet. In fact, the picture never left the Stoclet house in Brussels. Stoclet and his wife, who died within a week of each other, had willed the house and much of their collection, including the Duccio, to their son, Jacques, whose widow held on to it until her death, in 2001. Soon after that, her heirs (four daughters), who are very high on anonymity, agreed to lend it to an important exhibition in Siena of Duccio and his school. A color-plate reproduction of the picture—the first one ever made—was printed in the exhibition catalogue, but a few weeks before the opening, in 2003, the painting was withdrawn. This coincided with rumors of an impending sale, which turned out to be true.

Although everyone involved in the transaction is bound by omertà, it is known that both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the principal auction houses, engaged in lengthy and fiercely competitive negotiations with the heirs, and Christie’s eventually won the prize. “The family was very keen that the painting go to a public museum or institution,” according to Nicholas Hall, international director of Christie’s Old Master department. This was one reason that the family decided upon a private “treaty” sale, in which the auction house and the seller determine a price and then offer the work to selected potential buyers, rather than letting it take its chances at public auction; another reason was that a private sale is more private. “We got it by putting a significantly higher valuation on the painting than anyone else—by multiples—based on its being the last Duccio in private hands and its being so impeccably preserved,” Hall told me. Hall himself never met the sellers. “The contract document must have been four inches thick, and it was the most rigidly controlled transaction I’ve ever been involved in,” he said. “At times, it didn’t seem they were too keen to sell at all. I really have no idea what went into their thinking.”

One day last August, Hall had lunch at Serafina’s, on Madison Avenue, with his friend Keith Christiansen, the curator in charge of Old Master paintings at the Met. “This is going to be the most expensive pizza you’ve ever had,” Hall said, handing over an envelope that contained a high-resolution color transparency of Duccio’s “Madonna and Child,” and a lavish presentation booklet that Christie’s had prepared for prospective buyers. Christiansen, a tall, energetic man who clearly finds endless enjoyment in his work, brought these items back to his office at the Met, and took some very deep breaths.

Two years earlier, the Met had paid twelve million dollars for a small, surpassingly beautiful “Crucifixion” by Pietro Lorenzetti, one of Duccio’s pupils and followers. Christiansen had thought that this would be the best picture he ever recommended to the trustees in his years at the Met, where he has been since 1977. (His official title there is Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings.) The possibility of acquiring a work by Duccio then had seemed infinitely remote. There was only one in New York, the “Temptation of Christ on the Mountain,” at the Frick Collection; like the Duccios at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Kimbell Museum, in Fort Worth, and a few other museums around the country, the Frick painting is a fragment cut from the predella to the “Maestà,” Duccio’s towering masterpiece in Siena, which shows the Virgin enthroned (“in majesty”) and surrounded by saints. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and London’s National Gallery both possess freestanding triptychs attributed to Duccio, although parts of each are believed to have been painted by his workshop assistants. Expert opinion diverges on the degree of workshop contributions to several of the surviving works by Duccio, but only one scholar, the Swiss art historian Florens Deuchler, has ever questioned the attribution of the “Madonna and Child.” (Deuchler places the painting, which he has never seen, among works from “the orbit of Duccio”; he doesn’t say why, and the fact that he includes several other long-accepted Duccios in the same category leads Christiansen and others to describe his scholarship as “eccentric.”) Everyone else has accepted the picture as a signature work, complete in itself, and painted by Duccio’s own hand. Bringing it to the Met, in Christiansen’s words, “would transform the collection.”

Duccio’s fame and influence in fourteenth-century Siena were as great as Giotto’s in Florence, but, throughout the long and sometimes warring rivalry between these two city-states, history, power, and publicity favored the Florentines. By the sixteenth century, Duccio’s name was largely forgotten outside Siena. Giorgio Vasari, whose “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects” was published in 1568, extolled the great Rucellai Madonna, which Duccio had painted on commission for the Santa Maria Novella church in Florence, and which now hangs in the Uffizi; he called it a pivotal work that left behind the “Greek” (Byzantine) manner and took the first step toward the modern style, but he attributed the painting to Cimabue, Giotto’s predecessor and teacher. Vasari devoted only a brief entry in his book to Duccio, and got his dates wrong.

The rediscovery of Duccio and other forgotten masters, spurred by the pioneering scholarship of Bernard Berenson and others, had gained considerable momentum by the close of the nineteenth century. Early Renaissance paintings, known then as “primitives,” were increasingly admired, and in 1904 an important exhibition of “Antica Arte Senese” was held in Siena. A week or so before it opened, Corrado Ricci, the principal organizer, received a letter from a friend of his, saying that the “likeable and intelligent collector from Rome Count Gregorio Stroganoff” had two pictures that he would like to be included in the exhibition. One was an “Annunciation” by Simone Martini. The other was a small “Madonna and Child” by Duccio—the painting that now belongs to the Met. It was too late to get Stroganoff’s pictures into the exhibition catalogue, but both of them were in the show. Mary Logan Berenson, Bernard’s wife, writing about the exhibition for the influential Paris publication Gazette des Beaux-Arts, took special note of the Duccio. “Perhaps the most perfect work” on view, she wrote, “is the little Madonna of Duccio belonging to Count Gregory Stroganoff . . . which, small as it is, offers so much majesty, dignity, and profound sentiment.”

Stroganoff was a wealthy Russian expatriate who had lived in Rome for most of his mature life. His main interest lay in his art collection, which filled his large palazzo on the Via Sistina. He particularly liked Italian pictures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and he seems to have known a good deal about them, although his level of connoisseurship was perhaps not quite as high as his close friend Antonio Muñoz suggests in the catalogue of the Stroganoff collection. Muñoz would have us believe that the Count found his Duccio in an antique shop “in Tuscany,” had it restored, and personally identified it as a work by Duccio. Keith Christiansen thinks it more likely that the Count bought the painting from a Roman dealer. There are no documents on its provenance, at any rate, so we will never know, any more than we will know whom it was painted for originally, or where it had been for the previous six hundred years. This is not at all unusual for early Renaissance pictures, according to Christiansen. “We don’t know who the Boston triptych was painted for, or the London triptych,” he told me. “The Lorenzetti ‘Crucifixion’ that we bought two years ago was acquired in the nineteenth century by the French artist Paul Delaroche, who thought it was by Giotto.” The fact that the Duccio “Madonna and Child” is so well preserved suggests, however, that it has passed through relatively few hands since 1300. “It wouldn’t be completely out of the question that the same family passed it down,” Christiansen said.

When Stroganoff died, in 1910, he left no legal instructions regarding his collection. An Italian art historian named Verduì Kalpakcian, who has done research on Stroganoff, writes that the Count had a married daughter, Princess Maria Gregorievna Scerbatoff, who conveyed all rights of inheritance to her grown son and daughter, Vladimir and Aleksandra. These two wrote a letter in 1911 to the director of The Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, saying that, as their grandfather had wished, they were bequeathing two of his paintings to the museum—Simone Martini’s “Annunciation,” one of the two pictures that the old Count had put into the 1904 exhibition in Siena, and a “Tabernacle” by Fra Angelico. Stroganoff’s grandchildren subsequently gave The Hermitage two more Italian paintings, but Duccio’s “Madonna and Child” stayed in Rome. The Scerbatoff family moved back to Russia before 1912, and when the Revolution broke out, in 1917, they were trapped there. Maria, Vladimir, and Aleksandra were killed by the Bolsheviks in 1920, at the family estate in St. Petersburg. Vladimir’s widow managed to escape Russia with two young daughters: Olga, born in 1915, and Maria, born a year later. The three of them made their way to Rome, where, in a scene right out of an Ernst Lubitsch film, a loyal former employee of the old tsarist embassy offered them a tearful welcome and handed over the keys to the Via Sistina palazzo.

Having no other means of support, the surviving Scerbatoffs started selling the furniture and the art. Bernard Berenson, who had formed a lucrative advisory partnership with the dealer Joseph Duveen, knew the Stroganoff collection well. In 1922, he cabled Duveen a list of Stroganoff pictures for possible purchase, with Duccio’s “Madonna” at the top of the list. A Duveen agent went to the palazzo to look at Berenson’s recommendations, and reported unfavorably on the Duccio. “Very small and ineffective,” he called it, and, more to the point, “nothing for America.” Although the Scerbatoffs cut the price from five hundred thousand lire to four hundred thousand (approximately twenty thousand dollars), Duveen knew that the tastes of his American clients—the ones Berenson called “squillionaires”—ran to large, colorful paintings, and he declined to buy it. The picture was still unsold early in 1923, according to correspondence in the Duveen files, but soon after that it was acquired, through the Sangiorgi auction house, in Rome, by the Stoclet family, in Brussels.

Adolphe Stoclet, the son of a rich Belgian banker, had had the wit or the good fortune to marry a niece of the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, who lived in Paris and knew Manet and Whistler. Suzanne Stevens and Adolphe soon became ardent patrons of the avant-garde in theatre and music. In Milan, where they lived from 1896 to 1902, they developed a passion for the opera and for buying Italian paintings, especially early ones. From Milan, they moved to Vienna for two years, and then, in 1904, they returned to Brussels, where, having come into a large inheritance from Adolphe’s father, they engaged the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann to build them a grand house in the Wiener Werkstätte style of Art Nouveau. The murals and mosaics in their dining room were painted by Gustav Klimt. Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Cocteau, and other modernist luminaries attended their soirées and admired their proliferating art collection. Like most large-scale collectors of early Italian art, the Stoclets picked up some fakes here and there, including a small “Maestà” that they thought was by Duccio. (It was later traced to a master Sienese restorer and forger named Federico Joni.)

“Everything the Stoclets collected was something you could hold in your hand, small and precious,” I was told by Everett Fahy, the head of the European Paintings Department at the Metropolitan. Fahy visited the Stoclet house in 2002, to negotiate with one of Jacques Stoclet’s four daughters for the Duccio’s loan (later rescinded) to the 2003 exhibition in Siena. The painting, he said, still hung then where it always had, in Adolphe Stoclet’s private studio.

Reënter Bernard Berenson. In 1933, the depth of the Depression, Berenson sent a letter to Edward Fowles, the Duveen associate he trusted more than anyone else in the firm. “Now as for Stoclet,” he wrote, “I should deplore his having to sell. If he does sell, I naturally want you to buy. First and foremost the little Duccio ‘Madonna’ from the Stroganoff collection. It is the very loveliest and yet the most characteristic thing he ever did, I doubt whether a more precious painting of a primitif exists. It is a treasure you should dive for, and let no one snatch away.” Things moved at a more leisurely pace in those days. Duveen’s agent didn’t get around to scouting the Stoclet collection until 1936, and then, in a letter to Uncle (the code name for Joseph Duveen; Berenson’s was Doris), he dismissed the Duccio. The condition was unsatisfactory, this singularly myopic individual wrote, “and there was no colour left in the picture.” Whatever financial considerations may (or may not) have led Stoclet to think of selling his Duccio, Duveen again decided against trying to buy it, and that, according to Keith Christiansen, was very good news indeed. “Duveen would unquestionably have ripped off the frame,” he said, “and sent the picture to somebody to brighten it up.” Aside from Stroganoff’s early restoration and some minor later interventions, the painting has never suffered the shocks and abrasions that market-driven restorers can so assiduously inflict.

Christiansen had this and a lot more information in mind last fall, when Philippe de Montebello, the Metropolitan’s director, returned from vacation and was immediately shown the Duccio transparency. “When he heard what the asking price was, he sort of blanched, and said, ‘Where am I going to find the money?’ ” Christiansen recalls. “But you know Philippe. If he wants something, and the trustees know he wants it—I had no doubt that the funds could be found.” In twenty-eight years as the Met’s director, de Montebello has acquired, along with countless works of art, a huge reservoir of suave personal authority. “I was just smitten by the transparency, as anyone would be,” he told me, “and I decided we had to go and look at this picture.” This meant going to the London office of Christie’s, where the Duccio was held. “I knew it was something we could pull off and something we must pull off,” he said. “After all, the Met is the institution that bought the Velázquez ‘Juan de Pareja’ ”—in 1970, for $5.5 million—“and Rembrandt’s ‘Aristotle with a Bust of Homer,’ ” in 1961, for $2.3 million. He didn’t mention Jasper Johns’s “White Flag,” for which the Met paid something more than twenty million dollars in 1998—the museum’s most expensive acquisition until Duccio. Auction records keep being broken for more than that, of course; Picasso’s Rose Period “Boy with a Pipe” went for a hundred and four million dollars at Sotheby’s in 2004. For de Montebello, the Duccio’s price was almost incidental. “It’s not what you pay for the important things that people remember,” he said. “But, if you don’t buy them, it’s forever, and that’s unacceptable.”

The Duccio was being offered not only to the Met. The Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, had already turned it down, reportedly because of the price. This struck Christiansen as ironic, because the price was so clearly predicated on the fifty-five million dollars that the Getty had agreed to pay, two years earlier, for Raphael’s small, perfectly preserved “Madonna of the Pinks.” The British government temporarily denied that picture an export permit, to give English buyers a chance to come up with the necessary funds; they did, and the Raphael is now in London’s National Gallery. (There would be no export problems for the Duccio, because its owners were Belgian, and the relatively lenient Belgian laws on exporting art apply mainly to architecture and furniture.) The Met’s only serious rival at this point was the Louvre. The Louvre, like the Metropolitan, had no Duccio to anchor its glorious collection of early Italian art, and its acquisition money, from museum funds and private sources as well as from the French government, were eminently tappable.

De Montebello, Christiansen, and Dorothy Mahon, the museum’s head of paintings conservation, flew to London on September 24th. They spent two hours with the little painting. They held it in their hands, and examined the surface with a ten-inch magnifier. Its state of preservation amazed them. The colors of all Renaissance paintings have altered to some degree over time, especially the blues, which often become formless black shapes with no visible definition. In this case, the modelling of the folds in the Virgin’s deep-blue mantle was largely intact. Duccio had used a high-quality blue made from azurite, Mahon told me later, after she and her colleagues had analyzed the picture in the Met’s conservation studio. “The buildup was so skillfully done,” Mahon said, “with different colors of azurite and then lead white in the final one.” (White is more resistant to chemical change than dark colors are.) Seeing the painting at Christie’s was enough to convince de Montebello. “There was not an ounce of doubt in my mind about it,” he told me. A sense of urgency—he was aware that his colleagues at the Louvre had already been to see the painting—led him to make an offer on the spot, an offer that was, he indicated, close to the asking price.

The director’s move stunned Christiansen. “I never expected that he would make an offer,” he said. “I thought this was the first phase—normally, we would return, he’d talk to the trustees, and of course you’d try to get the picture here, but that was out of the question. The picture wasn’t leaving Christie’s until the whole deal was finished.” De Montebello concedes that he moved much faster than he normally would have. “Technically, I was not authorized to make an offer,” he explained. He had talked to several key members of the board, though, and, as he put it, “I just took a chance that my trustees would go along, and they did. But my offer was to Christie’s. They were going to relay it to the seller the following week, so I knew I would have time, and in fact by the time they relayed it to the seller I had already got the approval of my trustees.” (Note the recurrent modifier here: my trustees.) De Montebello dispatched several of his trustees to London to look at the painting, and he made sure that as many others as possible had a chance to hear Christiansen talk about it. Christiansen’s eloquence on the subject is torrential. He views the little painting as a decisive step in the evolution of Duccio’s style, which reached its apogee about eight years later in the “Maestà” altarpiece. As he put it to me, “It’s part of the whole revolution in expression that takes place in the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century—the revolution which of course has as its real figurehead neither Duccio nor Giotto but Dante. Dante is an absolute contemporary of Giotto, and a near-contemporary of Duccio, he’s writing at exactly the same time, and he even made a scene with Giotto and Cimabue in ‘The Divine Comedy.’ The fact that Dante chose to write in the vernacular, in Italian rather than Latin, is one of the turning points of the West. And this is precisely what these artists were about as well—finding a vernacular as opposed to an intentionally élitist, anti-popular form of painting. This is the real thing; painting is no longer an illustration but something that attempts to evoke a human response from the viewer.”

Although the purchase would put a large dent in the Met’s acquisition funds for years to come, de Montebello reports that some trustees told him, “If you have to pay more to get it, pay more.” Thomas Hoving, who preceded de Montebello as the Metropolitan’s director, might be pained to hear that. A brilliant showman and acquisitor—the Velázquez “Juan de Pareja” came in on his watch—Hoving was on the verge of acquiring a Duccio of his own in 1976, a very beautiful “Crucifixion.” It was being put up for auction at Christie’s in London by the widow of the Earl of Crawford, whose family had owned it for generations, and the museum’s acquisitions committee authorized Hoving to go up to $3.15 million in bidding for it. The trustees then changed their minds and voted to rescind the authorization. Hoving, who was out of the country at the time, was enraged. When he got back to New York, he called Douglas Dillon, the president of the Met’s board of trustees, and said, “I quit.” Dillon insisted that he stay on for a year, until the transition (to de Montebello) was worked out. “The Crucifixion” was bought in 1976 for a million pounds, and is now hanging in the Manchester Art Gallery, in England, but it is no longer attributed to Duccio. As Christiansen explained, “A large number of Duccio specialists believe, and I think correctly, that this is by the Duccio pupil and follower whom we call the Master of Città di Castello.”

Duccio’s “Madonna and Child” went on view at the Metropolitan last December, as the centerpiece of a second-floor gallery containing the Lorenzetti “Crucifixion” and other early Italian pictures from the collection. It was removed temporarily on June 13th and taken to the Conservation Department for intensive study and possibly some very minor repairs. “I feel that only the least should be done to a picture,” Dorothy Mahon said to me. “Only what’s absolutely necessary.” The painting will be back on July 12th. You can scarcely fault de Montebello for attaching his favorite modifier to the new acquisition. “It’s the single most important purchase during my twenty-eight years as director,” he said. “It’s my ‘Juan de Pareja,’ it’s my ‘Aristotle.’ ” De Montebello was quite touched that, among the many congratulatory letters the museum has received about the painting, there was one to him from Hoving. He was even more touched by the letter from a visitor he had never met, who wrote, “Finally, the Met has its ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” ♦

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